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A sci-fi novel set in South East England has just won the Booker Prize, which is a first for this genre. Imagine, though, if the setting had been Wales…
The aliens have invaded, and they’ve already won.
A capital city has been devastated, and civilisation is over.
A man wanders along the coast picking up strange objects which have been washed ashore.
This is, of course, fiction in a book called ‘The End of Everything’ whose author M. John Harrison is the oldest person ever to win the Booker Prize at 81.
It’s a dystopian tale of a man’s survival in a post-apocalyptic world.
The book’s central character, Phillip Tennent, makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up.
We are informed that it’s been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure, and government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, an entire continent has been mislaid.
It feels like the end.
Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can’t keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.
The End of Everything is a slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure into the limits of human understanding.
Mr Harrison is widely considered one of the major stylists of modern fantasy and science fiction.
The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) described him as “a singular stylist” and the Literary Review (LR) called him “a witty and truly imaginative writer”.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2025.
The capital city is London, and the coastline is Kent’s.
Imagine, though, if the setting had been rather different – that the city had been Cardiff, the government was the Welsh one, and the shoreline was, say, The Cambrian Coast.
This could work just as well, and there are any number of excellent writers here.
It might even win Welsh Book of the Year…
The memories of Phil’s incredible decades long award-winning career in journalism (when all stories were factual), as he was gripped by the rare disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a very different kind of book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
M. John Harrison’s book ‘The End Of Everything’ is available online or in bookstores at several prices.
